Jill Lepore

“A mystery, in Christian theology, is what God knows and man cannot, and must instead believe.”

“Americans, among the marryingest people in the world, are also the divorcingest.”

“Middle-class mothers and fathers turned out to be a very well-defined consumer group, easily gulled into buying almost anything that might remedy their parental deficiencies.”

“The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone’s.”

“As many as two out of every three Europeans who came to the colonies were debtors on arrival: they paid for their passage by becoming indentured servants.”

“The idea that debt is necessary for trade, and has to be forgiven, is consequent to the rise of a market economy. The idea that debt is wrong and should be punished is a feature of a moral economy.”

“Damning taxes is a piece of cake. It's defending them that's hard.”

“In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock.”

“An ordinary life used to look something like this: born into a growing family, you help rear your siblings, have the first of your own half-dozen or even dozen children soon after you're grown, and die before your youngest has left home.”

“I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.”

“Clarence Darrow, America's best-known trial lawyer, was also one of American history's most skilled orators.”

“In 2010, one in four Americans got the news from Fox News.”

“A problem with a president who leads by stirring the moral sentiments of voters is that he has got to keep stirring them.”

“A great deal of what many Americans hold dear is nowhere written on those four pages of parchment, or in any of the amendments. What has made the Constitution durable is the same as what makes it demanding: the fact that so much was left out.”

“In antihistory, time is an illusion.”

“As a matter of historical analysis, the relationship between secrecy and privacy can be stated in an axiom: the defense of privacy follows, and never precedes, the emergence of new technologies for the exposure of secrets.”

“In kindergarten, you can learn how to be a citizen of the world.”

“Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.”

“My grandmother, who taught me how to cook, didn't know how to read.”

“I was obsessed with George Orwell for years. I remember going to the town library and having to put in interlibrary loan requests to get the compilation of his BBC radio pieces. I had to get everything he ever wrote.”